Why Broadband In North America Is Not That Slow 376
An anonymous reader writes "The Globe & Mail has an article written in response to a recent study done by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard about how far behind the rest of the world the US and Canada are with regard to broadband internet. The refutation basically tears apart Harvard's analysis and shows why the US and Canada are actually far ahead of most European countries. 'Canada has a true broadband penetration rate of close to 70 per cent of households. And North Americans use the Internet somewhat more intensively than do Europeans, according to Cisco Systems data on Internet traffic. Further, business Internet traffic in North America appears to be at levels substantially higher than elsewhere in the world. Sadly, there is little systematic effort by international agencies to measure the intensity of Internet usage. Instead, we see comparisons of advertised speeds and "price per advertised megabit," which are especially misleading. Advertised broadband speeds vary from actual speeds. In North America, this is largely a result of "network overhead," and is quite modest. In Europe, however, the variation is often dramatic.'"
Don't RTFA (Score:3, Insightful)
"A multidimensional approach to benchmarking helps us separate whose experience is exemplary, and whose is cautionary, along several dimensions of broadband availability and quality"
Why do people write like this?
Re:Speed (Score:3, Insightful)
right. and the average of my speed tests is less than 5% of the advertised 8mb connection I am supposed to be getting.
The summary is dumb. Mr "anonymous reader" is basically saying that North America's internet is better because it is saturated by having higher use with a lower cap.
I'll read the article, but only after posting in accordance with slashdot tradition.
No matter where you are, 'remote' = poor service (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder how much difference there really is between the various counties?
I've been in places in the Americas, Europe & Asia where 'remote' could be as little as an hour's drive away from a big city.
Guess what? No broadband, & crappy cell coverage, (forget high bandwidth via cell).
Why? Normally simple economics. Look at the cell maps; they all claim to cover '9x%' of the population, conveniently forgetting that that's != to '9x' of the inhabitated surface.
Anyway, how much bandwidth do you really need? Is it really a handicap if you cannot run a call/data centre from some remote mountain or desert retreat?
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
They pay more then i do, they only have one choice for broadband (SBC Global which is now AT&T) and their download speed is slower then my upload speed. And i don't mean 'stated', i mean actual.
They have 768kbit/s down stated and they do get that but they pay around $45/month. In Germany i pay 29.90 euro for 32Mbit/s stated of which i actually get 3.9MByte/s sustained so 31.2Mbit/s actual and 2Mbit/s upstream stated of which i get like 220kbyte/s so 1.8Mbit/s).
My brother lives in mountain view (near google) and used to live in menlo park. On both occasions he had only two choices (dsl and cable form one provider each).
Each was horribly slow and very expensive. And this is in the F*ING HEART OF SILICON VALLY!!!. At least now in mountain view he gets free google wifi (which he uses exclusively, thank you google!).
In Germany i have 8 different DSL providers, all tying to outbid each other (this is in a small rural town with maybe like 5000 inhabitants). Unfortunately with DSL the max they can provide is 16Mbit/s over twisted pair, that's why i went with cable, which for the speed is just as cheap and way cheaper then anything i ever saw in the US. Sure i heard of things like 'Fiber to the premises' but in the areas my parents, my brothers and i lived it was never even considered, and in the last 10 years the price of 'broadband' was actually raised 2x. Each time my parents would cancel or threaten to cancel to get the 'new user' prices again which would be what they payed before. But it's not really much of a choice, if they want broad band they have to pay what AT&T asks.
This article is either total BS or somehow every place i know in the US has been miraculously spared of any type of competition leaving horrible service, horrible speeds for extravagant prices.
Does anybody in the US have something like 32Mbit/s (uncapped) $40/moth? If so, where do you live and what is your ISP?
Sooo... let's see (Score:2, Insightful)
I used to live in the US from 1996 to 2008, and I lived in the freaking center of a major city. In 1998 or so they started offering DSL, 768k SDSL, for like $80 per month. That was concentric, which ended up becoming XO and canceling all their consumer accounts. I switched to the excellent Speakeasy, but it was still more money for less speed at the time. Later, the truly craptasic Verizon DSL showed up, which many people signed up for, since the advertising was heavy. One of my friends have had that go on and off once a week or more until he finally got fed up and cancelled it. Another one of my friends signed up for their DSL in order to set up a test web site for class, but then found out after the fact that they block port 80. By the time I left, I had 3 or 6Mbit DSL for around $60 a month, but at least it actually gave that speed and had a static IP. On the other hand, cable internet also arrived, and gives speeds "up to 12mbps" last I checked, but seems to vary drastically according to my friends who use it. I had AT&T 3G before I left, which with my company discount was $80 a month for 3Mbit, which even in the best coverage areas was usually 2Mbit max. The upload speed was truly pathetic. Around the time I left, Verizon started to offer their FIOS service, which isn't even available in the city I was in, but in the suburbs. It could offer speeds "up to 30Mbps", but that would have cost more than whatever default speed they gave.
Now... The DSL here, is like $5 a month for 14-16mbps. 100Mbps or 160Mbps fiber is about $40 a month. 1Gbps is available now for not much more. 21Mbit 3G (with 4.8Mbps upstream) that actually delivers that speed most of the time is about $50 a month. 40Mbps WiMax is also available for cheap, but the reception is not good. In every case the bandwidth is better, they don't play games with port blocking/rate limiting and shit, and the price is cheaper. In fact, I use my 3G router to download at least dozens of GB per month.
Also, nearly everything mentioned above is available almost anywhere in Japan. I don't want to hear the excuse "oh that's because Japan is a small island." We have as much empty space as the US to be sure. As for people not being heavy users, there is a reason why the higher speeds are available. I don't know the situation in Europe first-hand, but at least in Korea it's similar to here.
Density is what matters, not size (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, California is a lot denser populated than Sweden. Hence, it is a lot cheaper to build out infrastructure in California. The actual size does not matter. Larger country with more people => same as several smaller countries, or likely even better due to economics of scale.
Why does Sweden (sparsley populated) have a lot of fiber build out + really large ADSL build out and low prices?
Re:This is just a reminder. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just size and population density.
For example, consider a large North American city like New York. Very high population density, very wealthy, lots of demand. By your logic, broadband there should be cheap and fast, but it isn't (or not at Scandinavian levels anyway).
(don't worry about moral superiority, this debate is really just frustration almost everywhere that we can't get the astonishing service they have in Sweden, argh)
Message seems to be "Hey, we aren't last" (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the article itself says that compared to Europe, we trail only an "elite group" of (mostly northern) countries.
The problem with that, (if you're old enough to remember the sixties when the destruction of WW2 was recent enough to have much of Europe still like developing nations today where you couldn't trust the water), is that WE used to be the "elite". That even some European countries have pulled way ahead when they used to be far behind is all the proof you want that we haven't done nearly as well as we could have. (And as for Japan and South Korea pulling way ahead of us: both countries REALLY were developing nations when I was a kid. People in shacks. Widespread hunger.)
Secondly, it's not how well we're doing leveraging an old 1930's copper wire infrastructure that was paid off by 1960 by telephones, or what we're doing with a 1970's coax infrastructure paid off by 1990 by cable TV bills; it's how well we're doing at putting in a whole new infrastructure for the Internet itself - one that will wipe the other two away.
That is, where are we with fiber-to-the-home? Ten years ago, it was reasonable to address voracious demand for the new service by piggybacking it on old infrastructures never designed for it, but were sitting there, already deployed. That should have been matched by an aggressive build-out of the replacement infrastructure designed for the job. It should be nearly done by now.
Alas, being able to send out TWO bills for the same infrastructure after dropping a few humming boxes on either end of the old wires, was far too lucrative to give up in favour of spending about 3 years of bills per house to run new lines, and government dropped the ball on regulating them to do that.
Whether just a few, or several, European countries are were just as sloppy, their regulators just as captured, as ours, does not mitigate the mistake; it just gives us some more company. Big deal.
Re:Don't RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Harvard. If they write in normal English people might discover that the study is stupid. See also: every sociology department in the world.
Re:Well... (Score:1, Insightful)
I live in Romania, Buzau, a small town, I get to choose from 5 ISP DSL, and 4 wireless broadband, I got the cheapest subscription, for 9 USD 6 mb externally and 100 mb anywhere in the country, public IP, no throttling, or download cap, or any other kind of limitations.
Re:Ever-more proof that Europe is a Potemkin Villa (Score:4, Insightful)
The US is the least "free" economy in the world. Highest agricultural subsidies. Spends the most of ANY country in the world on bailing out private corporations. Gave Warren Buffets (largest stockholder in AIG and Moodys) enough of that "gubbimint cheese" to make Buffet the single largest welfare recipient in the known universe ...
And you're "free" to pay for all this over the rest of your, and your kids, and your grandkids, lives.
Re:It may suck now... (Score:4, Insightful)
You exaggerate but we win... Except in prices. (Score:2, Insightful)
Checklist:
[ ] Can I get 1 Gb/s to home in Canada? (I can in my home town Stockholm)
I think that's too harsh. We damage our point by exaggerating in our examples... While you might be able to get that in Stockholm, you won't get that just about anywhere in Europe or even Sweden. But even when using more common figures... We are well ahead. We don't have monthly caps, have little to no throttling (I've never noticed any), etc... which seem to be more common elsewhere.
I live in Finland and am surfing through 100 Mbit/second line. It should be 100/10 but I usually get about 95 megs/second down and about 65 megs/second up assuming it isn't peak traffic hours (when it's closer to 100/10). Thus, from my somewhat anecdotal evidence I have extremely hard time believing that USA has more reliable connections. Also, while that gigabit connection is still rare, 100mbps connection begins to be pretty common at least here in Finland and operators constantly dig fiber and the area is expanding rapidly. Not in all areas but capital area and around notable cities at least. 24mbit/s has been pretty common in many areas for several years.
In my old apartment (suburbs of East-Vantaa) I could have gotten 100/10 connection but I didn't see the point so I just used the 10/2. I recently moved to HOAS student apartment with a roommate and we decided "Meh. We both study computer science, getting 100/10 would cost just 20 euros a month divided between the two of us... Why would we not get it?"
Now... I think that USA might still win us when it comes to price. In my previous apartment, 100/10 would have cost 55 euros (=75 dollars) a month. That might not be easily comparable if those bandwith's are less common in usa but even the 10/2 cost 45 euros (=61 dollars) a month. I think that you would get one cheaper than that in USA? Then again, prices between USA and Europe are never directly comparable. We have higher prices, usually higher wages (Our lowest wages are higher than at USA but our high end wages are less than there), higher taxes, need to spend less money to education/healthcare/etc. but need to pay more for gas... So it is very hard to just compare costs in the two without going in to deep analysis about respective quality of life... I guess that you should just look at "How large precentage of population has product X" instead but even then we would have cultural differences affecting that.
Re:Right (Score:3, Insightful)
"Choices". There, you just ended the entire argument.
My "choice" is whether or not I buy DSL. If I lived in a truly open and competitive market my "choice" would be whether to buy DSL or Cable. In the absolute best case scenario I have two companies to choose from.
Re:Don't RTFA (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the retort from Globe and Mail that tries to refute the study basically needs one big [citation needed] tag written under the whole thing.
Re:Right (Score:4, Insightful)
I've had the same problem with ADSL in Vancouver. My ISP is Teksavvy (Who're Great) but they resell Telus (Who suck). For three years now I've been unhappy with my 3/1 line. It started out I was able to get 2.5 / 384. But the SN ratio sucked. I complained, Telus tweeked the profile. I kept having my ADSL drop, I complained, Telus blamed my modem. I got a new modem. I kept getting dropped, I complained, Telus blamed that my wiring was wrong. I replaced the wiring from the demark, replaced it with Cat-4 cable, put the filter right at the DMark, filtered the entire house, no improvement. I complained Telus said their was DC on my line. I switched modems back to the original, no improvement. I got myself a new outdoor filter, no improvement. I complained, they said it'd cost $200 an hour for them to send a tech to look at it. My ADSL got worse, went down to 1.5/256 (Which was not good true, all the speed tests I could find were saying 900 down and maybe 105 up). Started the process of switching to Cable, got that in and started to switch my services across, (But it has no static IP address, want it for at least DNS). ADSL completely died, I complained, Telus said their was no problem on their end, must be my end, closed the ticket. Called back on a Monday, hit the roof, told Teksavvy to yell at Telus, they did. Found that the connection on the outside of the remote box was corroded, and fell apart and was in several pieces on the ground. ADSL is now at 3/1, very good SN. But it took three years of Telus saying everything was good on their end, it must be my end, and for the ADSL to completely fail before they would even look at their end and fix the problem. I'm keeping both cable and adsl active, since occasionally one or the other will go down (At least once a week right now, mostly is the cable, but its 5x faster then the ADSL)
With my experience with Canada ADSL I'll have to say if this study is correct then the rest of the world must be terrible, no better then a 300 baud modem to AOL. But I just don't see the complaints coming out of Europe and Asia. Also I use to work for a telecom that produced IPDSLAMS (Not where I worked but another division) and they were telling everyone how they were happy to be rolling out 58 mbps ADSL to Japan, that was 6-7 years ago. I have 3 mbps ADSL now and 15 mbps cable (When everyone is asleep and hopefully my house is the only place with power). There's no way that North America is better then the rest of the world.
France, average of 3.2 Mbps ? LOL ... must be MB! (Score:2, Insightful)
If akamai is not coping with French geeks starving for bandwidth and only deliverying an average of 3.2Mbps, it does not means that the internet access is 3.2Mbps here in France.
FYI, I got an average of 80Mb/s, 40Mb/s and less than 2ms to most french sites (Mo => MB for those who likes 10MB/s).
ping to french hosted ping to google.com is about 12ms, .uk is about 20ms and slashdot is about 130ms.
But ping to akamai.com is about 50ms and the same for lemonde.fr (a akamai customer) 40ms.
The only conclusion for me is : akamai is slow ;-)
By the way, I pay less than 30€ per month (unlimited bandwith, unlimited call to most countries, free wifi to millions of AP, more than 150 of TV chan, IPv6, tivo like boxe provided, etc).
If Bell want canadian citizens to think Canada is the best country for broadband, it is up to them. European, Korean & Japanese knows where is the reality.
Re:Right (Score:1, Insightful)
This is because the majority of customers haven't demanded better quality of service here in the US.
Your typical (non-Slashdot) internet user basically browses the web and checks email. From a dial-up to broadband experience was a big, demonstrable difference; but going from 500 kb/s to something like 500 Mb/s, non-tech-savvy users really won't care. It'll take a few companies concluding that the cost model will benefit them to upgrade to that type of service and the customers buying into it before we'll see those speeds here in the US.
You could say we can get larger cars cheaper here in the US vs EU for a similar reason.
Punditry != Analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
Economists with extensive practical experience of telecommunications regulation have already rebutted the Berkman Center report that harshly assessed Canadian broadband performance, but it is also worth pointing out how much room for interpretation there is in broadband comparisons.
Let me back up this point by just letting you know the research was refuted and not bother pointing out anyone who's refuted it.
Residential broadband subscriptions, however, are taken at the household level, not at the individual level. And big businesses often connect several hundred employees with one “line.” The United States and Canada have 2.6 individuals per household, compared with 2.2 in Germany and some other European countries. Thus, if North American household sizes fell to German levels, and all households subscribed to broadband, the United Statse and Canada would have an additional seven lines per 100 persons... Thus there could well be more employees “connected” in North America, although there might be fewer connections.
So, wait, you're saying that there's more internet penetration in North America because in NA there are more people able to check their e-mail from work?
And North Americans use the Internet somewhat more intensively than do Europeans, according to Cisco Systems data on Internet traffic. Further, business Internet traffic in North America appears to be at levels substantially higher than elsewhere in the world. Sadly, there is little systematic effort by international agencies to measure the intensity of Internet usage.
In fact, there's so little effort to measure internet usage that I can just spout this line and pretend it's true without anyone having to refute it!
Real-world speed testing efforts, while not perfect, tell a dramatically different story from comparisons of advertised speeds. Using real-world data on the amount of time taken to deliver files to end users from its global network of servers, Akamai Technologies reports that the average download speed for Canada was 4.2 megabits a second, against 3.2 Mbps for France, whereas the OECD finds that the average advertised speed from French ISPs was a staggering 51 Mbps.
Ah, but were they testing from home servers, or from work, which is where most people check their email in Canada?
Fifty-Mbps speeds (and their prices) are representative of user experience only where advanced fibre and cable networks are widely on offer. Although parts of France have developed impressively in this regard, such networks are accessible to at most 25 per cent of households, and the take-up of high-speed services is very low.
As opposed to the, what, 2% of North American households that get that kind of speed?
Canada is likely soon to have a proportion substantially higher than France's of homes served by advanced fibre and cable networks that can deliver such speeds, thanks in part to the ubiquity of cable networks that are less costly to upgrade.
Also, next year the Cubs will win the pennant. It's gonna be the year! They've been building such a strong team!
Robert Crandall from the Brookings Institution has shown that in recent years, the capital intensity of the wireline operations of the incumbent North American phone companies has significantly exceeded that of their European counterparts. In 2008, Telus's wireline capital expenditures were about 25 per cent of its corresponding revenue, nearly double the ratio for many European incumbents. Likewise, the Wireless Intelligence database shows that between 2004 and 2009, the capital intensity of wireless operators has been 50 per cent higher in North America than in Western Europe.
How do we know that North Americans get better internet? Because they spend more money on it! Or do they?
So it is that in Ca
Re:Sooo... let's see (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you like to avail the Comcast?
Back when I had Comcastaway a year or so ago, their tech support was largely Indian. It was definitely a crapshoot ("To not be getting angry with me, sir! I am but trying to help you!" but if you called back a few times you'd eventually get someone with a half a clue. Now, at one point I was paying an extra couple bucks a month for a second IP (I didn't want to run my VoIP box through my main router.) Then I upgraded my service to the next tier, and all of a sudden my phones stopped working. I reset everything, and then the phones worked fine but nothing else did. Turned out they'd dropped provisioning for my second IP. So I call up about it, and was told that I needed a service call. It went kinda like this:
"No, I don't," I told her, "It's a provisioning problem."
"Well, I wouldn't know about that. We'll need to send a tech to make sure your equipment is working."
"No, it's working fine. Tell you what, send me over to provisioning."
"Oh, we're not allowed to do that. I can't call them either."
At that point I gave up.
"Whatever. Send the tech."
So a pair of Comcast technicians shows up, and asked me what the problem was. They were pretty sharp, I have to admit: the Internet boys were generally good, it was the Comcast Digital Voice techs that really needed some more training, but that's another story. Anyway, I explained the problem, and the lead tech blinked and asked, "Why did you ask for a service call? That's a provisioning issue." Duh.
So he calls up provisioning and this African-American woman answered and just wouldn't shut up for two seconds after he explained the problem, I was amazed that she found time to breathe. "He can just avoid the problem by simply plugging his VoIP box directly into his router. That would save him the monthly charges {blah blah blah, and furthermore, more blah} does the customer know that he doesn't need a second IP?". The guy looks around my shop and said, "Yes. I think he does. In any event HE JUST WANTS WHAT HE'S PAYING FOR." So the lady says, "Okay, all fixed." We restarted everything, it appeared to work, they left, and an hour later my second IP disappeared again. Argh. Still, all in all they did provide a reasonable service (a little expensive, but it was fast and fairly reliable) but they lost me when they started screwing around with torrents. Hands off my goddamn pipe, Mr. Robertson.
Now I'm on AT&T U-Verse, and so far I've been happy. I have some interference issues that I discovered are due to noise on my power line, of all things (yeah, now I'm in power company Hell, but I can't blame AT&T for that.) I'm on the 18 mbit/sec tier, am getting 22 and I'm getting 2 mbit/sec upload. No complaints with AT&T so far. Ultimately, it just depends upon where you are. I'm in a broadband-competitive area, so they have to work for it. I feel sorry for people I know that only get Internet access from a single outfit: unless it's a fairly small, well-run operation they usually get crappy service. If it's a Comcast or a Verizon, and they don't have to compete for your dollars, they usually don't bother.
Not hard to figure out why AT&T was so heavily regulated back when its Ma Bell days. I'm spite of what our laissez faire friends would have us believe, sometimes you do need regulation.
Re:Ever-more proof that Europe is a Potemkin Villa (Score:2, Insightful)
The US is the least "free" economy in the world. Highest agricultural subsidies.
Actually, both Europe and Japan have substantially higher agricultural subsidies than the US.
Re:This is just a reminder. (Score:2, Insightful)
The United States is BIG.
There are VAST stretches of the country that are nothing but farms. Then there's more of the country that's mostly wasteland dotted with people here and there.
There are parts of Australia as remote as some parts of the US. Europe really doesn't compare.
MY hometown might be something like Tombstone Arizona.
Re:This is just a reminder. (Score:3, Insightful)
Europe's GDP per capita is only about 70% of the US. Its citizens, on average have a significantly poorer standard of living.
Which european country are you talking about? Because there are some fairly large differences between different countries (and no, a european country isn't really the same as a US state no matter how much some people would like it to be that way).
And of course with socialism the money that you make is spent according to how the government decides, not how you decide.
The government is supposed to be an agent of the people (although for some reason right-wing governments seem more occupied with trying to sell off anything and everything the government owns for ideological reasons, at least here in Sweden where they know that they rarely get to spend more than four years in power before being voted out for another 8-12 years again after screwing everything up...
Also, sometimes the government is the right actor to make investments, particularly long-term och large-scale investments since governments are more likely to be around to pay their bills ten, twenty or thirty years from now.
/Mikael
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Point being, what is "installed" and what is "usable" are two entirely different things.
Re:Density is what matters, not size (Score:5, Insightful)
You are assuming an even distribution of people. You can toss out the north 80% of Canada's land area and only loose 5% of their population.
Wiring a major US city shouldn't be any more complicated than wiring a major EU city, and we still fall behind in nearly every case.
Re:Density is what matters, not size (Score:3, Insightful)
And California has 234 people per sq. mile, what's your point? They don't have 1Gb to the home available, do they?
Re:This is just a reminder. (Score:1, Insightful)
If you are going to call the penetration rate in Canada dire, look on a map. Canada is fucking huge. Total area of Canada is about the same size as ALL of Europe. And while a large percentage of the population live in large cities, there is still a significant portion of the population that lives in rural areas, in the middle of nowhere, or even further out than the middle of nowhere.
Admittedly, there are some areas where the lack of broadband seems silly, but it also has to do with economics. I know a small town called Clyde in northern Alberta, a good hour and a half north of Edmonton, about 15 minutes east of the town of Westlock. (These times are at 110km/h highway speeds) This town cannot get cable internet. They cannot get DSL. They cannot even get the wireless internet from Bell that is popular in Edmonton, and would be expected to work well in a flat area like that. Westlock, however, has high-speed access, only a short distance away. So why is this? Clyde is a town of about 500 people - 500 comparitively poor people - surrounded by farmland in every direction. Running high-speed services to that town would cost a lot more than they could even hope to ever earn back from the likely number of subscribers.
The real kicker? Phone lines suck too - you're lucky to get a modem to connect at 28.8kbps. :P
(no, I don't live there, but I've visited relatives that for some godforsaken reason live there)
Re:Density is what matters, not size (Score:4, Insightful)
***You are assuming an even distribution of people. You can toss out the north 80% of Canada's land area and only loose 5% of their population.***
On top of which, from what I find on the Internet, Canada actually does a decent job of getting DSL to wide spots in the road 200 miles from the nearest traffic light. Whereas in the US anyone who has the poor judgment to live in the boonies very likely has neither cable, nor DSL. When it comes to broadband, some North Americans are more equal than others.
Re:This is just a reminder. (Score:2, Insightful)
Remember not to confuse "socialism" the political doctrine with "socialised" as in sharing costs across society. America does this for health (medicare), defense, roads, education, environmental health, etc etc etc. Europe is no more socialist than are obama's policies, that is to say, not very.
Socialism = public ownership of the means of production, anything that doesn't entail this is IN NO WAY socialist.
To "the eric conspiracy" below, you should bear in mind that the "europe" you're talking about nowadays includes romania, poland the old yugoslavia etc, I highly doubt your figures would stand if they only included the "old europe" say the nations of the EU prior to 1999. Its also worth pointing out that the scandinavian nations which have the highest tax rates and the most "socialist" policies have some of the best GDP/head and standards of living in the world.
Re:This is just a reminder. (Score:2, Insightful)
We have dramatically different engineering challenges than European nations. Comparing the two is impossible.
Missing the point; what is it? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is all a weird argument to make. Broadband is much faster and cheaper in quite a few European countries than in the US, and while you can try to weasel your way out of it trying to paint it as unimportant or something, it is a strong demonstration of an important principle: government-enforced competition works.
As soon as the Bush gov't got into office, its FCC removed the line sharing mandate that allowed competition in the broadband market. Inversely, at the same time, the European Commission forced member countries to implement such competition. In France for instance it allowed a small company, Illiad, to innovate. While we had disastrously low penetration for Internet connectivity before 2002, the numbers shot up after that. They also introduced VoIP, free international calls, TV over IP, and so on. Another company started offering free WiFi to all its subscribers through any of its subscribers' "boxes", a feature that is now available on all ADSL providers. Every ADSL modem doubles as a WiFi router, and broadcasts a distinct ESSID for the "free wifi" network. You connect to the hotspot, log in with a user id / password, and you are then connected on a different VLAN than the owner's so you don't see what's happening on their home network, thankfully.
It might be that the situation in the US is not as bad as it's cracked out to be, but there's no doubt that it didn't have the same level of innovation.
Re:Right (Score:3, Insightful)
I also have Teksavvy and I agree their service is fantastic. But here in Ontario we have suffer through what Bell claims is "service".
For example. My torrent programs are throttled, which makes downloading distro's to play with a pain in the ass. Of course you think it's the ISP right? Wrong. For about a month Teksavvy kept sending me email updates about their fight to get Bell to stop throttling the lines of their customers. The CRTC of course did nothing. So in as a work around they now offer a dual line setup to get though Bell, but it costs more money because of the need to split the packets to get around bell.
Also Teksavvy only offers 5Mbit service. I would like to get more but according to the CRTC Bell only has to offer Teksavvy the same service they offer their own customers. Except Bell offers more then 5Mbit, so the whole thing is just a big joke.
In the end, after dealing with Rogers for 3 years, and hearing horror stories from my friends about Bell I decided to stick with the slower Teksavvy account and filtering. They are super cheap and have a plan with no cap.
Better to have good men (Teksavvy) in bad ships (Bell), then bad men (Bell/Rogers) on bad ships (Bell/Rogers).
Re:This is just a reminder. (Score:5, Insightful)
Its citizens, on average have a significantly poorer standard of living.
Except when they get sick or have their kid sick, or run into any number of exceptional circumstances for which insurances are just prohibitive
If you are sure to be on the winner side all your life, any form of socialism sucks.
There is more chance that your kid will be crippled by the time he is 30 than on the cover of Fortune mag.
Re:This is just a reminder. (Score:4, Insightful)
You also have significant advantages, that we do not. As for comparing the whole of the USA to a single European country, yes, that's stupid. But you can do it on a state to state basis. For example California and Sweden aren't entirely different when you look at size and geography, but California has much larger metro areas (and 5 times as many citizens).
The advantage the US companies have, is they have a massive market to aim at.
* You don't need to set up a new company for every single state you wish to work in. You do in Europe.
* You can start in one state and expand without having to set up another call centre - unless you start in the UK and expand to Ireland you are going to expand into another language area.
* You don't need to have a large team of professional translators on staff, just to work in more than four markets.
* You aren't going to run into language problems across your offices in different states.
** Even setting up shop in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, you are going to have language problems, even though those three language are very similar - you are very likely to end up with English as the lingua franca in any kind of inter-office communication, and even then you'll have people who are rubbish at English leading to very bad communication. Granted, the US has its share of Americans who are rubish at English.
Re:This is just a reminder. (Score:1, Insightful)
> The problem is hauling this traffic via large fiber optic cables across a land mass the size of North America dramatically increases the cost per node to deploy services.
You're overlooking the fact that a lot (maybe even the majority) of Sweden's internet traffic is to the same servers as US internet traffic.
Backbone bandwidth is cheap and plentiful, because it's a competitive market. The issues are with the last mile, where there's little or no competition.
Re:It may suck now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, at least it would be building up infrastructure that would provide long term benefits for decades to come. Sure beats buying people new cars and dishwashers.